Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal is an unrivalled guide to America's past. A novelist, playwright and essayist, he has been a public - often controversial - figure in both the American literary and political scenes for nearly sixty years.

He is the author of twenty two novels, five plays, screenplays, over two hundred essays and two memoirs. In fiction and non-fiction writing alike, he reconstructs history with wit, vibrancy, vast knowledge and a keen sense of high drama.  A friend of many of the figures who shaped politics and culture in the second half of the twentieth century, Gore invariably provides a fresh perspective on American history and power.

Gore was raised in Washington DC and as a young child he read aloud to his blind father, Senator Gore.  As his guide he gained access, unusual for a child, to the corridors of power and the Senator's steadfast isolationism contributed to one of the major principles underlying Vidal's political philosophy. He has been consistently critical of what he perceives as a foreign and, by extension, domestic policy shaped by the imperatives of American imperialism. Because of his matter-of-fact treatment of homosexual relationships in books such as The City and The Pillar, Vidal is also often seen as an early and unrelenting champion of sexual liberation.

 Vidal's 1960 play The Best Man opens on Broadway in Spring 2012.  In an election year, this play about Presidential candidates is set to repeat its 2000 success.